The influence of second-order metacognitive judgments on cognitive offloading within the monitoring-control relationship

Abstract Cognitive offloading refers to using an external medium such as paper to remember information rather than relying solely on memory. Previous research has suggested that individuals’ perceived memory performance may influence their decision to employ cognitive offloading as a learning strategy. However, ubiquitous distortions in metacognitive judgments limit the learning gains. Motivated by this, the current study incorporated second-order metacognitive judgments (SOJs) with distorted first-order metacognitive judgments (FOJs) within a learning context that allowed cognitive offloading. We investigated how individuals decide to employ cognitive offloading based on two levels of self-assessments. Eighty participants from the U.S. were recruited remotely to complete online paired-associate tasks. They learned 48 paired associates on an item-by-item basis, providing a FOJ, an SOJ, and a strategy (offload or not) on each trial. Our findings showed a significant effect of interaction between FOJs and SOJs on the selection of cognitive offloading. Additionally, there were significant variabilities in employing cognitive offloading across individual participants and word pairs. We concluded that SOJs influence the association between FOJs and strategy choices. Furthermore, we attributed the observed interaction to the assessment and regulation of SOJ about FOJ.